America's Cuban Territory

Long before the arrival of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay has been a source of tension and controversy

It was January 1996 and I had just landed on the island of Cuba in a U.S. Navy
plane, which was strange enough. Now I was riding a launch, bucking low waves,
entering bright blue Guantánamo Bay, heading for the naval headquarters on the far
shore. No Cuban military or local civilian militia shot at us from the beach, even
though we were within range.

Then we rounded a spit of arid, windswept, rocky land, and I saw cacti. In Cuba,
the pearl of the Caribbean? Cacti in a country synonymous with the humid heat,
verdure and temptations of the tropics? But there it was, a stand of cacti worthy
of a John Ford Western. Had it been imported by an imaginative and accommodating
Navy commander trying to make ensigns from Arizona feel at home? No, I was later
told; it had been cultivated by order of Fidel Castro himself to fence in the U.S.
troops stationed there, and keep Cubans out of the base.

It was then that I started to comprehend the thorny issue of the United States
Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The arrival at the station six years later, on January 11, 2002, of captured
Taliban fighters and operatives of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network is only the
latest chapter in the episodic history of "Gitmo," as it is known, transforming,
once again, this secluded tropical backwater into a geopolitical hot spot.

According to the captain's log of his second voyage to the New World, Christopher
Columbus spent the night of April 30, 1494, anchored in what is now Guantánamo Bay.
He called the site Puerto Grande, and it proved hospitable: no record exists of
trouble befalling the fabled mariner that night. But the history of Gitmo since
then is sprinkled with occupations, combat and international confrontations.

The British navy occupied the bay for four months in 1741 when it fought Spain over
trade interests in the American colonies. A century and a half later, in 1898, a
battalion of American marines became the first U.S. troops to land in Cuba during
the Spanish-American War. According to local lore, Spanish guerrillas, who signaled
to each other with dovelike coos, closed in on the outpost and killed two of the
marines, the first American casualties of that conflict.

But in the end, the United States would win that war, inspired by Teddy Roosevelt
and his Rough Riders' charge up San Juan Hill outside the city of Santiago de Cuba.
Spain was forced to relinquish Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, transforming
the United States into an emerging global power, and Cuba gained its independence.
In 1903, the new Cuban government signed an agreement with Roosevelt, who had since
become president, allowing the United States to lease 45 square miles of Cuban
territory, on either side of the mouth of Guantánamo Bay, for use as a "U.S.
Coaling and Navy Station." The rent was 2,000 gold coins per year, which today is
worth $4,085.

The Cubans insist that when their constitution was written in 1901, its framers
were forced to include the wording of the Platt Amendment, a law passed
unilaterally by the United States that same year that gave Washington the right to
intervene in Cuba. Otherwise, the United States would not withdraw its occupation
troops. According to the Cubans, the leasing of the land for the naval station was
a direct result of that strong-arm tactic.

In 1934, the lease was renegotiated with the
stipulation that the outpost would revert to Cuban control only by mutual
agreement. No such agreement has ever been reached; American servicemen and
servicewomen have been stationed there ever since.

During the first half of the last century, life at Gitmo was generally low-key. In
1939, on the eve of the Second World War, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
expanded Gitmo into a port for air and sea patrols, but it remained far from the
action. Apart from that, during intermittent civil wars and other political turmoil
in Cuba, troops stationed at Guantánamo were deployed briefly to protect U.S.
economic interests on the island, and sometimes to restore order. But they couldn't
head off the Cuban revolution, and in the late 1950s Gitmo, relatively quiet since
1945, was forced to wake like Rip Van Winkle from its drowsy isolation.

On June 27, 1958, rebel forces led by Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and now head of
the Cuban armed forces, kidnapped 29 U.S. sailors and marines who were returning
from leave inside Cuba. U.S. servicemen regularly roamed the island, especially the
nearby city of Guantánamo's bars and brothels, the latter located in the aptly
named zona de tolerancia, or zone of tolerance.

The captives were released three weeks later, unharmed. But on January 1, 1959,
Fidel Castro assumed power in Havana, and the United States immediately prohibited
its forces stationed at Gitmo from entering Cuban territory.

Before the revolution, many Cubans worked on the base in civilian positions. But
the United States, afraid of infiltration by spies, stopped hiring locals to staff
those jobs. Those already employed at the base were allowed to continue after
further background investigation, and today 10 aging Cuban "commuters" still work
there, walking through the main gate every day. The other nonmilitary positions
were filled by specially recruited foreign nationals. Jamaican stewards, for
example, work in the officers quarters, and Filipinos run the ferry that connects
the two sides of the base.

On January 4, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower announced the formal break in
relations between the United States and Cuba, but emphasized that the rupture had
"no effect on the status of our Naval Station at Guantánamo."

Despite that declaration, the laid-back tenor of life at the base did change. At
the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961, Guantánamo was put on high
alert, although it was geographically far from the action. Later that year, Castro
planted his cactus curtain. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, dependents of the
military personnel and other civilians were evacuated. In 1964, after Cuban
fishermen were fined for entering Florida waters, Castro cut off fresh water to the
base. In response, the United States imported water and then relocated a
desalinization plant from the mainland.

Underwater fencing was strung to head off those trying to enter Gitmo from the sea.
Both the Cubans and the Americans planted land mines on either side of the
17.4-mile fence that defines the land borders of the base, the United States alone
burying some 50,000 of them.

The two sides also constructed watchtowers to oversee that mined "no man's land"
and staffed them with guards toting automatic weapons. Occasionally, shots were
fired across the fence, and the Cubans claim several of their border guards were
killed in the early years. (The United States denies the allegation.) But no one
can recall a shot fired in anger since 1972. For the next 20 years or so, Gitmo was
visited by balmy breezes and the occasional storm, but not much else—until the
Caribbean immigration emergency broke on its shores in the mid-1990s.

The crisis was precipitated by riots in Havana in August 1994, in response to which
the Cuban government announced that it would not block attempts by its citizens to
leave the island. Tens of thousands shoved off to sea in boats and rafts, trying to
reach the United States. Reacting to the human tide, the Clinton administration
decreed that it would no longer allow Cuban refugees to automatically enter the
United States, but would pick them up at sea and stash
them at Guantánamo while it reviewed their asylum applications. Some 20,000
Haitians were already detained there, after having been intercepted at sea trying
to escape their ravaged land for the coasts of Florida. Almost all of them were
eventually sent back to Haiti.

By 1995, some 51,000 refugees populated Guantánamo. They lived in camps called
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. and one denominated Camp X-ray, a cell block for those
considered dangerous. It is in a new incarnation of Camp X-ray that the captives
from the Afghan war were locked up in early 2002.

For the majority of Cuban and Haitian refugees, Guantánamo was a very different
experience than it is for the Taliban fighters and
suspected Al Qaeda members. The Cubans and Haitians lived in tent cities, which
included busy streets, churches, libraries, clinics, playing fields, community
centers and a refugee government. They organized dances and staged concerts by such
Cuban-American performers as Gloria Estefan.

Those camps also suffered some of the problems of cities—thefts, fighting, and even
alleged brutality by military police. In September 1994, Cuban detainees staged
protests, demanding to know when they would be released; they were forced back into
their camps by Gitmo military guards. Later, the United States and Cuba reached
immigration accords, and refugees picked up at sea have since been transported back
to Cuba, where they can apply for one of the 20,000 American visas available
annually. Only those who prove they will suffer political persecution if returned
to Cuba proper are taken to Gitmo, where they stay until they are granted asylum by
third-party countries.

In January 1996, I arrived at the base to interview the last of the 30,000 Cubans
who had been housed there. A day later, the last of the camps were dismantled and
Gitmo resembled a ghost town. The Americans eventually dug up the mines on their
territory. The Cuban mines are aging and sensitive to the point that they are
sometimes detonated by slithering iguanas or scampering banana rats.

By January 2002, Gitmo was the home to a handful of asylum applicants and also some
2,700 resident personnel, both military and civilian. Those residents live mostly
in suburban-like, duplex-style housing. The base has a bowling alley, an outdoor
theater that shows first-run films, schools, a church, even a McDonald's. Every
year, a Cuban-American Friendship Day celebration is staged to honor the
diminishing number of Cuban employees. An annual chili cook-off is one of the
base's big events and fund-raisers.

The arrival on January 11 of the captives from the war on terrorism shattered that
strangely middle-American idyll. Soon an international controversy shook the camp:
a photograph of recently arrived detainees kneeling outside their chain-link cells
in orange jumpsuits, blindfolds and shackles drew accusations of inhumane treatment
by the U.S. military. President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied
the accusations. But they also insisted that the internees would not be treated as
prisoners of war, which would have insured them certain legal protections, because
they did not meet key stipulations of the Geneva Convention, including, among other
things, the fact that they didn't wear uniforms. A global outcry made them change
their minds about the Taliban fighters, but the Bush administration wouldn't budge
on the al Qaeda captives.

As more detainees arrived on flights from Kandahar, in Afghanistan and were
questioned, it was determined that they came from at least 32 countries, including
Britain, Sweden, France, Russia, Australia, Denmark, Kuwait, Pakistan, Yemen and
Saudi Arabia. Three hundred had arrived by late February. The importation of these
men from faraway lands brought new phenomena to Gitmo. A handful were Christians,
but the majority were Muslims. They were issued copies of the Koran, and a Navy
chaplain of the Muslim faith intoned a lilting summons five times per day, calling
the men to prayer. On February 23, the Muslim prisoners celebrated Eid-al-Adha, The
Feast of the Sacrifice, the most important holy day in the Islamic year. The camp
was suffused with the smell of lamb stew prepared for the prisoners by camp cooks.
But their life at Gitmo was not all prayer and hospitality. At least five
interrogation huts were constructed, and U.S. military sources said that certain
captives were chosen to be sent to Guantánamo because they might possess valuable
information about terrorist organizations. The base suddenly found itself on the
very front lines of intelligence gathering in the war against terrorism. In that
role, Gitmo apparently yielded results. The alert issued by the FBI in mid-February
that Yemeni terrorists might strike in the United States or against American
interests in Yemen reportedly was based in part on information obtained from
interrogations at Guantánamo.

How did the government of Fidel Castro react to the use of a corner of Cuba to
house not refugees, but alleged terrorists? Although it was expected that Cuba
would protest, it did not. The Castro government, which condemned the attacks on
the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon, offered medical personnel to work at
Camp X-ray, an offer rejected by the United States. This does not mean that Cuba
condones the U.S. presence at Guantánamo Bay. The treaty signed in 1903 and again
in 1934 was forced on Cuba, the Castro government insists, and the yearly check for
the rent of the base has not been cashed in more than 40 years.

Still, the Cubans say an atmosphere of détente has developed over the years between
the forces stationed on either side of the fence. That spirit of cooperation was
forged during the quiet years of the 1970s and 1980s. Even today, the respective
military commanders sometimes meet to discuss concerns of common interest. Among
other things, they are alerting each other to air traffic, which has suddenly
picked up with the arrival of the captives and more U.S. troops.

It is not yet clear how long Camp X-ray will serve as a cell block for Muslim
fighters, but the United States has raised the possibility that it will send most
back to their countries after they are interrogated. What will happen with the
others has not been stipulated, but it is likely that before too long the cells
will be dismantled and Gitmo will be returned to its habitual state—an outpost off
the beaten track, a sleepy backwater on a windswept tip of Cuba, planted with
cactus.

John Lantigua, a journalist and novelist, is the author of The Ultimate Havana
(Signet, 2001), a novel about cigar counterfeiting.